Upgrading your Mac to a smaller internal drive

One should get the largest internal SSD in a new Mac as the budget will allow. I would never downsize the drive because of using iCloud Drive and optimized Mac storage. The iCloud Drive is a syncing feature, not an off computer storage facility. If you accidentally delete a file locally it will be deleted from the iCloud Drive. Also if one needs to use one of the optimized files it must be downloaded in full before it can be used. That slows the machine down.

Personally, the best backup strategy is an external drive that's about 2 ½ to 3 times the size of what you're backing up with Time Machine and an external SSD clone of your boot drive that is updated on a daily or weekly basis. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to create the clone an automatically backup the user data on a daily basis along with Time Machine drive to do hourly incremental backups.

Files stored on iCloud are also on the Internal Drive for the times when Internet Connections are not available.

This allows the user to still function.

Only the changes that occur on the Locally Stored Files and Internet Connections are re-established are uploaded back to iCloud.

That was kind of was covered in earlier posting and predicated on the User Using iCloud as it was designed to function. Plus as Old Toad mentioned, if the file is in iCloud and not Internal Copy is available - the Whole iCloud must be Downloaded in its entirely before the user can work on it. Now, the user has the Copy on the Internal Drive

I’m going to come at this from a different point of view using experience of my upgrading from a 2008 Mac Pro Desktop with four HDD installed in the drive bays.

30 plus years of personal computing has made me realise that over time a computer accumulates many redundant apps and long term (never accessed) files. So my strategy has always been to do a clean OS installation and to manually transfer only those files that I need locally and to reinstall any apps I actually use.

This method doesn’t cause any problems with iCloud because what goes in iCloud stays in iCloud.

As external storage is as cheap as chips all those old, seldom used files, not in iCloud, can be stored on usb drives (with suitable backups).

In a nutshell I decided that my M1 iMac didn’t need TBs of storage so I opted for the 512GB SSD, and I was right, now nearly a year after getting the M1 iMac I’m only using just over 50GB (MacOS, Apps and local files).

I also have hourly Time Machine backups (when I’m using the iMac) and a weekly, bootable clone of th iMac drive .

By enabling full iCloud integration I can access my stored files on my iPad or iPhone and in an emergency I can access iCloud from a browser on another computer.

If the user really does not what files that are stored on iCloud also on the downsized Internal Drive of the New Computer, that can be done.

Log into www.icloud.com with your Browser and perform whatever actions with the applications offered on iCloud.

Any Other devices using the same Apple ID can still access the same files and the changes perform within iCloud will be reflected on your Other Devices